May 30, 2009

Much media attention and credence has been given to the likes of atheists Bill Maher, Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins. One wonders of course why such credence is given to atheism in general -of whom 21% believe in God- much less to those who make ridiculous statements like Maher has made and like Dawkins has made.

In a time when the new atheists are actively seeking to proselytize new converts by the likes of advertising campaigns on buses in Chicago and in London, it is heartening to see one renowned atheist renounce his godless faith and embrace faith in God and according to The Wall Street Journal believes in the resurrection of Christ.

A.N. Wilson, author and journalist recently wrote in the New Statesman about his recent return to his once held faith in God. It is quite an interesting story. Wilson describes his descent into atheistic faith as a Damascus Road type of experience while his return to theistic faith was a gradual process.
In the New Statesman piece, Wilson writes about his reasons for abandoning atheism and embracing theism are quite interesting. One in particular is his point about human language.

"Watching a whole cluster of friends, and my own mother, die over quite a short space of time convinced me that purely materialist 'explanations' for our mysterious human existence simply won’t do – on an intellectual level. The phenomenon of language alone should give us pause. Do materialists really think that language just “evolved”, like finches’ beaks, or have they simply never thought about the matter rationally? Where’s the evidence? How could it come about that human beings all agreed that particular grunts carried particular connotations? How could it have come about that groups of anthropoid apes developed the amazing morphological complexity of a single sentence, let alone the whole grammatical mystery which has engaged Chomsky and others in our lifetime and linguists for time out of mind? No, the existence of language is one of the many phenomena – of which love and music are the two strongest – which suggest that human beings are very much more than collections of meat. They convince me that we are spiritual beings, and that the religion of the incarnation, asserting that God made humanity in His image, and continually restores humanity in His image, is simply true. As a working blueprint for life, as a template against which to measure experience, it fits."